MANY CHILD survivors of the Holocaust owed their lives to the deadly serious business of games played collectively or alone, that enabled them to adjust to dangerous situations, sometimes even to control them, and to relieve tension in relative safety. These survival mechanisms were rooted in poetry.

In a moving memoir reminiscent of Anne Frank’s diary, Professor Zsuzsanna Ozsváth of the University of Texas describes the role played by games in her own, childhood victory over death in the climax of war and in the face of prolonged, organized racist mass murder in Hungary. Her experience of the life-preserving games of Jewish children during the Holocaust in Budapest is very close to my own. Other accounts are turning up elsewhere, often in verse.

If you read just one of the thousands of personal Holocaust memoirs published nowadays by the thinning, final generation of Jewish survivors, perhaps this one – When the Danube Ran Red By Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, Syracuse University Press, 2010, Hardcover, 184pp. $17.95, ISBN-10: 0815609809 & 13: 978-0815609803 – should be it.

She was then devotedly preparing for the promise of a career as a poet and concert pianist. Her ability amidst the battle to absorb herself in the solitary game of reciting poetry and playing the piano in the absence of an instrument may have saved her life.

A dozen years later, she left Hungary illegally, taking with her just one valuable possession: a collection of verse by Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), enslaved and murdered by fellow Hungarians because of his Jewish birth despite his well documented, sincere conversion to Catholicism.

Her excellent English translation of that book, composed in collaboration with the American poet Frederick Turner, has greatly contributed to Radnóti’s worldwide reputation today as perhaps the greatest among the Holocaust poets. In an imaginary dialogue with the Prophet Nahum, Radnóti describes the total war engulfing Nazi-occupied Europe (in the Ozsváth/Turner translation published in Foamy Sky, Princeton University Press, 1992 & Corvnia/Budapest, 2002):

POET:

…now the swift nations
slay one another, the human soul stands as naked as Niniveh.
Then to what purpose the exhortations, the hellish green clouds of
the locusts, what purpose? when humans are baser than animals!
Here and elsewhere they smash on the walls the innocent infants,
steeples are torches, homesteads flower as furnaces, households
roast in their embers, in smoke the factories rise up and vanish.
Streets full of people on fire go galloping, sink with a rumble,
hugely embedded the bomb-burst shatters masses asunder;
shrunken as cowpats on fields in the summer, the dead are lying
piled in the plazas and squares of their cities; and as it was written
all that you prophesied now is fulfilled. But say, what brought you
back to the earth from the primal dustcloud?

PROPHET:

Wrath: that forever
orphaned the children of men must serve in the hosts of the blasphemous,
shaped but not natured like men – and that I might see the unclean
citadel’s fall and unto these latter days speak and bear witness…

Today she is the Leah and Paul Lewis Chair of Holocaust Studies and professor of literature and history of ideas at Texas University in Dallas. Her writing and lectures have won her a string of distinguished honours including an American Fulbright and a top Hungarian Academy of Sciences award. Her new memoir is a profoundly moving work of literary as well as academic merit.

The title of the book refers to a scene witnessed by Zsuzsa the child, enacted nightly along the banks of the River Danube throughout the siege, when the Hungarian Nazis executed groups of Jewish captives, men women and children, bound by ropes in pairs to prevent survival. The idea was that if one had by chance escaped death by shooting, the survivor might still be dragged down by the weight of the attached corpse.

“Nobody screamed,” she recalls, “nobody cried. You could hear nothing but the shots and the splash of the bodies falling into the red foam (of) the river, which flowed… like blood.”

The Radnóti poems today are helping Hungary to comprehend the tragedy. This country of fewer than 10m souls was responsible for the humiliation and murder of some 600,000 of its Jewish citizens during the final phases of the Second World war, most of them brutally delivered for petty financial gain to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Zsuzsa and many other Jews crammed into the vermin-infested ghetto tenements of Budapest or hiding elsewhere in the capital escaped deportation. But they had to live with the constant threat of mass murder and worse – there was worse – meted out by the armed thugs of the Hungarian Arrow-Cross/Nyilas party, the role models of the neo-Nazi rabble on the rise today throughout Eastern Europe.

Her greatest secret fear was enforced separation from her beloved parents. That came to pass as the invading Soviets smashed through the combined German and Hungarian defences. But even then, she managed to keep her calm, alone in hiding, sustained by poetry and music.

The ferocity of the three-month siege, including vicious hand-to-hand fighting under constant Allied aerial bombardment, is compared by historians to the earlier battle for Stalingrad. But unlike Budapest, Stalingrad had been at least emptied of its residents. The siege of Budapest raged over the heads of 800,000 civilian witnesses, mostly women and children. The death toll approached 160,000. While the children composed their verse and played their games to delay death, many combatants on both sides reserved their last bullets for themselves for fear of being captured alive by their savage opponents.

Even during the final confrontations, the orgy of anti-Semitic violence continued in the ghetto. Zsuzsa, I, and all the others I know who in any way participated in the siege of Budapest have never overcome, or even attempted to overcome the experience.

Nearly seven decades after the event, Zsuzsa feels still indebted to countless miracles incorporated in the poems and games ghetto children created to distance themselves from the face of death. These usually took the shape of a human face.

There was Erzsébet (Erzsi) Fajó, Zsuzsa’s gentile playmate, friend and nanny who risked all for the survival of her employers who in turn eventually adopted her. Her name today is preserved by an olive tree planted in her memory in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

There was the family’s kindly, grey-moustached postman who turned up unexpectedly to seek out Zsuzsa in the ghetto when she was separated from her parents after witnessing her first massacre staged by the Arrow-Cross. He must have been aware of the peril he risked as he delivered to the tearful child messages of hope from her mother.

And there was a uniformed member of a Nazi raiding party dragging away the Jews, whose hastily whispered advice saved the entire family. Was he an angel? Or a decent cop? Or a member of the armed Zionist resistance that regularly infiltrated the ranks of the killers to save their victims?

The imagination of the temporarily unsupervised children flared as they wrote and recited their poems and played in an atmosphere of heightened tension approaching the state of collective hysteria endured by their families. The poems and games gave the children “space,” the author recalls, “that allowed us to leave behind the world of the adults as well as the ghetto house and with it the Germans, our fear of separation and the threat of death.”

They acted out well-known dramas in verse or invented new ones, reflecting the cultural pursuits of their community. “Good morning, Ophelia,” the ghetto children no longer allowed to attend school greeted each other in the morning, or “Good morning, Tristian,” or “Good morning, Rigoletto!”

Picking up the game, she relates, the person so addressed would try to meet the challenge by answering the call and stepping into the chosen theatrical role. The children sometimes changed the script to suit the prevailing mood or circumstance. They played feverishly together throughout the day and composed and rehearsed new scenes alone in their minds late into the night.

Some children managed to save lives through verse and play by diffusing potentially lethal situations, adds Professor George Eisen, executive director and associate vice-president at Nazareth College of Rochester, New York.

His pioneering, interdisciplinary study of the ghettoes and concentration camps of Europe (Children & Play in the Holocaust: Games Among the Shadows, Massachusetts University Press, 1988 & Corvina/Budapest 1990) cites instances of children’s games staged to divert the attention of guards from forbidden activities punishable by death, such as smuggling food or participating in educational activities.

Eisen is also a Jewish survivor of the Hungarian Holocaust and the siege of Budapest. He poignantly quotes a five-year old girl engaged in serious conversation with her doll:

Do not cry, little one!

When the Germans come
to grab you…
I will not leave you.

I add below my own recollection of a collective, unconscious endeavour by Jewish children in a tenement not far from Zsuzsa’s apartment block to express and relieve through play their community’s suppressed fear of death:

GHETTO GAME

Beneath a gloomy square of the sky
in the shadow of awesome, looming walls,
a crowd of kids met day after day
to test, to learn in that well of twilight
which ones in the block were destined to die.

Just a few at a time. Our faces were grey
and small, our eyes were clouded with fear.
We hung the Book and a key on a thread –
for we understood the path of death
yet could not make it go away.

We huddled close with lonely dread
in our hearts. The Bible turned around
and with it, the key. They came to rest
at random to point at a ghetto child.
He would be the first among the dead.

The block has grown, the world progressed.
I, the survivor, stand in the sunlight
aware of the cloud in every eye
as fear of the future grips the globe,
rekindling doom in every breast.

The most moving record of a Holocaust survival game that I know is in Zsuzsa’s book. It describes the triumph of a terrified, starving girl over a nightmare endured during three days and nights at the height of the siege when she was confined to a cupboard in an abandoned, sprawling apartment by the river, exposed to heavy machinegun fire and intermittent bombing.

She recalls: “I decided to practice the piano in my head… and started to imagine I was playing Beethoven’s f-minor sonata, op. 3, from the first measure to the last. Some passages went very well, some not at all. While my right hand’s fingers were really singing in the second part, my left hand’s fingers were too slow playing the triplets in the fourth part.

“I need to practice this more, I thought. But I did not go back to work on those passages; rather I started to play the second sonata in A major; and again, I thought through every single note. In the meantime, the bombing started anew… and (I) recited poetry.”

CAPTION: Zsuzsanna Ozsváth… a moving memoir (I hold a copyright release from her, authorizing free reproduction of the enclosed photograph. TOL)

THOMAS ORSZÁG-LAND is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent. DEATHMARCH, the fourth edition of his translation from the Hungarian of Holocaust poetry by Miklós Radnóti, was published by Snakeskin and The Penniless Press, both in England, in 2009.

From THOMAS LAND in Budapest

AUSCHWITZ is a museum. The smoke has now dispersed, and each generation to the end of history must make peace with the past and resolve to live with our ability to commit mass murder.

András Mezei (1930-2008), a major Jewish-Hungarian poet, has left behind a retrospective exploration of the Holocaust for our time. His voices of the past address us with an urgency and directness unheard within museum walls. There are many such voices speaking to us of terror, folly, greed, cruelty and absurdity. Mezei’s poetry makes them sound like our own voices. His first full collection of Holocaust poetry in English has been published in my translation as Christmas in Auschwitz (Smokestack Press/England, 2010, 74pp., £7:96p, ISBN 978-0-9560341-9-9).

Mezei survived the National Socialists’ attempt at the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Europe as a child in the Budapest Ghetto where some 17,000 souls perished around him from hunger, disease and the fancy of uniformed bandits.

Unlike the other great poets of the Holocaust, like Paul Celan, Primo Levi and Miklós Radnóti, Mezei refused to come to terms with death. Indeed, his work is a celebration of the unconquerable spirit of his people. And unlike Anne Frank, he had the luxury of time to give voice to the concerns of the victims while he was at the height of his literary powers. This is how he sums up the experience of the survivor in a single couplet:

NIGHTMARES

How many nights must pass before
I need not wake up anymore?

I first met him shortly after the Second World War. We were both recovering from the trauma of the Hungarian Holocaust in a camp for Jewish children at Békéscsaba run by a Socialist-Zionist movement then called Dror Habonim. It was also preparing us for emigration to what was to become the state of Israel, mostly on board ships like the famous Exodus running the British blockade.

Mezei went. He found employment as a semi-skilled labourer, but returned to Hungary after a year and a half because he thought he stood a better chance of attracting a girlfriend in the land of his birth. Eventually he read literature in Hungary and became a poet, novelist and polemicist. Like many Holocaust survivors of his generation, he embraced enthusiastically the ideal of Communism in the hope of building a just society free of racial, religious and class prejudice. His first serious doubts arose over the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against Soviet power.

Unusually for a Hungarian writer, his work has been published in several languages. He was a literary journalist most of his life.

After the collapse of Communist rule just two decades ago, Mezei founded Budapest City Press as well as Central European Time, a literary-political journal that forged a leading role in the debate and reconstruction of post-Soviet Hungary. He established a club that served as an informal meeting place for writers, academics, politicians and businessmen. He used it to gain great influence in shaping Hungary’s trade relations, specifically in the privatization of state assets and in the cultivation of commerce with other formerly Soviet-administered countries.

Some high officials were appointed on his advice. He appeared impervious to high-pitched criticism by his literary rivals behind his back that a poet ought not to soil his soul by the world of money and power.

I met him again early during the transition to democracy, when he commissioned me to translate his Holocaust poetry into English, I joined the editorial board of his journal and we became close friends. For me, our collaboration was part of a wider project, an anthology of the Hungarian Holocaust in English translation.

Mezei’s father, a jobbing fiddler usually engaged to play in taverns and fairgrounds, perished at Auschwitz. Mezei’s poetry draws on the culture of destitute, itinerant provincial Jews carving out a precarious existence in the rapidly industrializing, complex society of inter-war Hungary.

But the voices of the Holocaust speaking through Mezei’s verse transcend the limits of class and nationality as well as the geographical frontiers of Nazi-occupied Europe. He called these pieces ‘fact poems’ as they are based mostly on his personal experiences, together with professional interviews with survivors, fragments of contemporary correspondence, medical and administrative records and analyses and post-war criminal proceedings.

His work lacks a thirst for vengeance. Consider his gentle portrayal of the passive bystanders:

DEPORTATION

The people they’ve lived with in the village
are being herded in front of closed portals,
still and silent each. The fences
would conceal all sight, all feelings,
except for the tea-rose, the violet and weed
leaping through to reach out towards them.

Mezei, who won a beauty contest as a boy with golden curly locks, became short and fat in his old age with a shock of white hair beneath a wide-brimmed hat. I think he often deliberately acted out the anti-Semite’s stereotype of the ghetto-Jew.

He was passionate and cantankerous, shrewd and naive, generous with his love and famously mean with his money. But he published a long list of worthwhile books at a perpetual commercial loss unfailingly recouped from Jewish funding agencies, the post-Communist Hungarian political elite and a bewilderingly complex web of private enterprises.

His experience of the war clearly shaped his life. The word Holocaust (Greek for burnt offering) or Shoah (Hebrew for disaster) or Pharrajimos (Roma for dissolution) conveys very inadequately the impact of a nearly successful attempted annihilation of an entire culture.

The final and most destructive phase of the process began with the military occupation of Hungary by Hitler’s Germany in March 1944, at a time when Allied victory in the Second World War was already obvious. Less than three years earlier, an ultra-Nationalist government of Hungary – a minor, semi-feudal, East European backwater – had declared war on the incredulous governments of Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union in return for territorial concessions promised by Nazi Germany and at its neighbours’ expense.

Its ill-equipped armies were routed, its independence lost first to Germany and then to the Soviets.

Despite mounting repression and hysteria whipped up by the country’s relentless setbacks on the battlefield, the largely assimilated Jewish-Hungarian population had lived in relative safety until the German invasion. The mass racist murder by industrial means of the Jews and Roma as well as the homosexual and the politically dissident minorities was introduced under direct German rule.

The ensuing Hungarian Holocaust culminated in the destruction of some 600,000 civilian lives (including perhaps 70% of the entire pre-war Jewish-Hungarian population and up to 50,000 Roma). The well integrated provincial Jewish populations and the other minorities singled out for annihilation were humiliated, robbed, massed into ghettos and other assembly points and transported in inhuman conditions to extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and slave-camps such as Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria.

Due to diplomatic pressures, the deportations were formally halted before the capital could be completely emptied of the target populations. Tens of thousands of people in Budapest were crammed into specially designated tenements under armed control. Many others sought survival in hiding. Both groups were exposed to persecution by the law enforcement and paramilitary agencies, persistent aerial bombing by the Allies and the eventual three-month Soviet siege of the city, whose ferocity is widely compared to that of Stalingrad. Mezei describes the consequent epidemic of casual murder:

JASON

She carefully unlaced her grandmother’s boots,
then kicked off her own. Before the pair: the river.
Behind them: Jason, the neighbours’ son from the square
lit by the frozen snow – and his machinegun.
Jason, discharging his first-ever magazine.
Jason, standing stunned as the tumbling bodies
are whisked away and gone with the turbulent current.
…Had he done that? Was there so little to life?

In addition, tens of thousands of Jews were exposed to otherwise unnecessary perils of war, engaged in forced labour under Hungarian command or leased to Germany to work the copper mines of neighbouring occupied Serbia. Hungary was the only power during the war to assign to the battlefield its own citizens – Jews – as slave labourers. Some 48,000 were deployed with the Hungarian invasion force to the Eastern front alone, clad in light civilian clothes in the bitter East European winter, to build fortifications on starvation rations. Many were murdered by their own commanders.

All this is still little known to the Hungarian public, who were spared during the decades of the subsequent Soviet subjugation from the pain of confronting the country’s shameful past. This explains the vulnerability of this region to neo-Nazi agitation at a time of economic insecurity. A new generation of historians is trying to change this. But Holocaust poetry remains an irritant in Hungary.

Some of the country’s great Holocaust poets are largely ignored at home, although they are becoming known abroad. And those who cannot be ignored are often misrepresented. Generations of Hungarian school children have been required to recite Miklós Radnóti’s poetry by heart, but they have been taught that he was writing about the general horrors of war rather than a specific genocide. They are still told that the poet had met a ‘tragic death’– not that it was racist murder committed with the approval or at least the connivance of the Hungarian majority.

Yet Mezei’s poetry is part of a process of healing. He writes:

VOICES

Suddenly I speak in my mother’s voice.
Suddenly I speak in my father’s voice.
Suddenly I hear my people speak
in my voice

Mezei started publishing Holocaust poetry only in old age. So now do some others, albeit very cautiously. Apart from one brave and inadequate recent attempt, I am not aware of a single anthology of Hungarian Holocaust poetry published in all the decades since the war. My own sources of original material are mostly small-circulation one-off collections, early Second World War publications, unpublished manuscripts and mass-circulation books whose contents are deliberately misinterpreted in lengthy analyses by literary/academic hacks.

I began translating poetry as a young man in the hope of learning from my betters. I saw myself as a fine-art student in a public gallery copying the work of a great master in order to learn his techniques by re-creating the same composition on a different canvass.

But there is now a very urgent, very different dimension. I believe that the poets of the Hungarian Holocaust like György Faludy, Eszter Forrai, Ágnes Gergely, Éva Láng, Magda Székely, Ernö Szép and many others including Mezei can now take their place in the European literary tradition. Their poetry may perhaps help the post-Holocaust generations – the descendants of the perpetrators, and of their victims, and of the passive bystanders – to face our dreadful inheritance together and learn to live in harmony.

THOMAS ORSZÁG-LAND is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent who writes from London and his native Budapest.

From THOMAS ORSZÁG-LAND, in Budapest

BOOK after translated book, a soft-spoken poet who spent a long life writing in an awkward minority language unrelated to most others is taking his rightful place among the giants of world literature — even in his homeland.
György Faludy was born in Budapest a century ago last September. He was a Jew who wanted desperately to be a Hungarian, but had to spend some of his best writing years in exile or prison. His poetry, circulated at home illegally during the grim years of Nazi and subsequent Soviet occupation, kept alive the flame of freedom and decency for generations of his adoring public.
Yet the Hungarian literary establishment has still managed to keep his name out of the schoolbooks, despite the two decades since the advent of democratic rule. Entirely in vain. For his poetry has now become a potent force in the struggle of post-Communist Europe to liberate itself from the lingering spirit of its bygone tyrannies.

Maecenas Press of Budapest has just issued a Faludy collection in English translation (37 Vers/37 Poems, trans. Peter Zollman, 2010, 208pp., ISBN: 9789632032252, 2,490 Forints or about £7). Penguin Modern Classics of London has also just released Faludy’s autobiography (My Happy Days in Hell, trans. Kathleen Szász, 2010, 522pp., ISBN 9780141193205, £12.99p), a book first published in English in 1962, anticipating Alexander Solzhenitsin’s Gulag Archipelago by more than a decade.

A natural teacher and spellbinding raconteur, Faludy leads his reader across a blood-drenched landscape, sharing his enjoyment and surprise at morality, friendship, loyalty and sheer physical as well as aesthetic pleasure that have somehow overcome the carnage. His autobiography is an essential literary document of the 20th century, the testimony of a writer whose stature is comparable to those of his beloved Auden, Lorca, Rilke and Yeats.
Faludy, who died in 2006, was my teacher for most of my life and my close friend towards the end of his. I have discussed the book with two of its principal characters, also close associates of the author, who were impressed with the veracity of Faludy’s recollection. Many of the events of My Happy Days in Hell are also described in Faludy’s poetry, written during or shortly after their occurrence. These contemporaneous records confirm the accuracy of the later work.
He was relentlessly pursued all his life by the hostility of the agents of repression as well as the love of a devoted public. He burst on the literary stage of Budapest just before the rise of Nazi oppression with a collection of ballads exuding the love of freedom, adapted from the mediaeval French of Francois Villon. The following lines from the book (part of the poem Despised and Welcomed, rendered in my own English adaptation) describe Faludy’s life as well as the romantic character of Faludy’s Villon, now a familiar figure of Hungarian literature.

…Triumphant stars erect their vast cathedral

above me and dew calms my feet below

as I pursue my god (and he’s retreating)

and feel my world through every loving pore.

I’ve rested on the peaks of many mountains

and wondered at the sweating quarry-slaves

but whistling bypassed all the stately towers

for I knew saw through our rulers’ fancy games.

And thus I have received but scorn and kisses,

and thus I’ve learned to find an equal rest

in squalor and beneath the whitest pillars,

a man despised and welcomed everywhere.

The Penguin autobiography illustrated by the Maecenas collection covers a lively and horrendous 15-year period from Faludy’s first exile to his release from prison in 1953. The book opens with a description of the country of his youth, a semi-feudal backwater locked in bitter resentment then as now over Hungary’s territorial losses suffered after the First World War. The author fled to Paris after a Hungarian parliamentary deputy had suffered a heart attack on reading a Faludy poem lampooning his pro-Nazi voting record. The poet thought this was his greatest literary achievement.
In Paris, Faludy courted, wrote and starved a lot and met people who later influenced European history. As the Nazis advanced, he retreated first to French North Africa and then to the United States where he served the Free Hungary Movement as its honorary secretary. He later enlisted in the US Air Force to fight the war in the Far East theatre against Japan. He astonished his hosts afterwards by declining their offer of American citizenship and returning to his war-torn homeland at the first opportunity. Soon he found himself in prison on trumped-up charges.
The poet endured torture in the dungeons of the Communist state security organization AVO, which had been used earlier for the same purpose by the Hungarian Nazi movement, the Arrow-Cross. Eventually he “confessed” to being a CIA spy, but laid a trap for the planners of a prospective show trial by identifying his alleged American minders as Captain Edgar Allan Poe and Major Walt Whitman. He spent his final night in that building — now a museum called The House of Terror, open to the public — awaiting his promised execution at dawn before being dispatched, instead, to serve a 25-year forced labour sentence handed down without a trial.
He saved many of his poems composed in captivity by entrusting them to his memory. He was assisted in this by his fellow prisoners — including my two informants whom I eventually interviewed in Toronto — who memorized and recited them during work. On their release from prison in the confusion following Stalin’s death in 1953, the same comrades helped Faludy to reassemble the poems for publication.
Faludy chose exile again after the collapse of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Soviet rule, edited a literary journal in London, taught at Columbia University in New York and received a Pulitzer Prize as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto. He was nominated for a literary Nobel.

He returned to his homeland yet again at the age of 78, together with his lover Eric Johnson, an American classicist poet, to witness the implosion of Communism and the birth of democracy. He was greeted by a tumultuous welcome and more literary prizes. More than a decade later, he married Fanny Kovács, a poet then aged 28. This was his fourth marriage, in which he spent his final, extraordinarily creative years.

Many English translations of Faludy’s poetry have been collected also in East and West (1978) and Learn This Poem of Mine by Heart (1983), both ed. John Robert Colombo, and Selected Poems (1985), trans. Robin Skelton. Faludy’s irreverent Hungarian adaptation of the Villon ballads has been adapted further in my own English Free Women (1991).

His poetry is rich in unforgettable, romantic or flippant turns of phrase that unfailingly draw their power from keen perception. The poems are often composed in delicate, chanson-like tones that can unexpectedly give way to heart-chilling horror, without ever compromising the highest standards of literature.
Yet Faludy has remained an irritant to many Hungarian teachers, critics and editors. I think this is because of his irrepressible voice in praise of freedom, an anathema to the very nature of the literary establishment here that has evolved through the long decades of rigid regulation under successive tyrannies. And perhaps he was too successful at flouting social conventions and egging on his detractors to embarrass themselves.
The literary elite tore into Faludy’s reputation after his death by questioning the value of his poetry and even the veracity of My Happy Days in Hell. While the world mourned the passing of a brilliant mind, a minor Hungarian writer opined in an obituary published by The Guardian newspaper of London that the book contained “picaresque adventures and saucy anecdotes… even if it is uncertain how much of it is based on fact”. He also asserted that Faludy’s verse was “rarely faultless”.
Another writer stated on an establishment literary website, without citing evidence, that the book was full of “fibs”. And even before his funeral, which turned into a spontaneous demonstration of national grief, the mass circulation Népszabadság newspaper of Budapest categorically ruled that “the Hungarian literary canon does not recognize Faludy”.
Perhaps the silliest and most revealing criticism was sounded during the recent election campaign by a leader of the far-Right Jobbik party — the heirs of the notorious Arrow-Cross — expressing outrage over the recital of a Faludy poem at a public event. Faludy was a “well known Zionist enemy of the Hungarian nation”, the speaker declared (also in the absence of evidence) and proposed that in future all poems chosen for public performance should be routinely vetted by the authorities.
But all this will pass into irrelevance. The city of Toronto has already adopted Faludy as its own poet and named after him a small park beneath the apartment where he had spent 14 years of his exile. As Eastern Europe passes through its awkward present transition away from authoritarian rule, Faludy may yet teach its administrators of culture how to trust their own public, and even their own hearts.

THOMAS ORSZÁG-LAND is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent. His last book was CHRISTMAS IN AUSCHWITZ: Holocaust Poetry Translated from the Hungarian of András Mezei (Smokestack, England, 2010).

Collected Poems by Bernard Kops

David Paul Publishing, London, 2010, £9.99p.,

Paperback, 132pp., ISBN 9780954848262

=================================

From THOMAS LAND

AMONG the greatest events of British literature this decade is the publication of the collected poems of Bernard Kops, the doyen of contemporary European verse.

His career began close to seven decades ago when he became the bard singing of the ruthless exploitation and callous neglect endured by the now bygone Jewish immigrant communities of London’s East End — their old men huddled around the wireless (his words) weeping tears of pride at weather forecasts from Radio Moscow. He has gone far beyond that.

Queen Elizabeth last year rewarded him, at the advice of Gordon Brown, then her prime minister, with a Civil List Pension in recognition of his service to literature. This is a very rare honour that he now shares with Lord Byron and William Wordsworth. Probably the only member of the British poetry-reading public still doggedly unaware that Kops has taken his rightful place among these literary giants is Kops himself.

Kops (b. 1926) is a top British dramatist, his plays performed worldwide for decades. He has written more than 40 plays, nine novels and two autobiographies. He runs a master-class for playwrights. But poetry remains for him, as he put it, the quintessence of everything in literature.

His plays have won many prizes and they have been performed in many translations. One of his recent classics, The Dreams of Anne Frank (1992), has been performed in Hungary, and it is now being translated into Czech to confront the rise of anti-Semitism sweeping Eastern Europe. The play is about the miracle of survival through the Holocaust that claimed Kops’ large extended family in Amsterdam. Anne Frank’s Fragments from Nowhere, a hugely powerful poem in the new collection, is a prayer for peace.

He is extraordinarily prolific. A sense of humour almost never deserts him. Here is how he says he experiences creativity:

Poems are like grandchildren.

You should never bribe or persuade them

to visit you.

…But wait until they enter and overwhelm

and delight you.

Kops is my teacher and my close friend. He is a spellbinding public speaker whose still frequent performances are often remembered in small detail by his audiences for years after such events. He is easily approachable, with informal manners radiating the warmth of a secure early childhood when he was spoilt by the love of his six elder sisters. But his face betrays the suffering endured by him as well as his extended family.

This is Kops’ eighth collection of verse. The poems are mostly deceptively simple, insightful, dark-and-joyful and poignant. Many are already classics, having assumed lives of their own. The book includes more than 40 hitherto unpublished pieces among the old favourites describing the desperation of destitute communities dependent for survival on soup kitchens and pawnbrokers.

They also deal with Kops’ own, quarter-century struggle with drug addition and an attempted suicide. Familiar literary figures crop up in the work, friends and idols like the First World War poet Isaac Rosenberg, another Jewish master from the East End of London, as well as W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg and the recently deceased Adrian Mitchell. The collection addresses death much too much for my comfort.

Kops‘ poetry combining touching simplicity with naked passion stems from an 18th century English literary tradition revived in the 20th century by Rosenberg. The poems project great empathy and deep emotional commitment, their power driven by a desperate, unconcealed awareness of the vulnerability of all living things.

The new collection contains something very Jewish but also very rare in Western literature — a deeply felt recurring declaration of passionate, lifelong matrimonial love. The poet’s muse, wife, lover, friend, editor, mentor and manager and the mother of his four children is Erica, a diminutive woman of enormous intensity, the sort of matriarch you might think Rachel of the Bible might have become if she had been granted a longer life. The collection is dedicated to her.

This is how Kops describes her in a train ride:

Beside me is a lovely girl

with long dark hair.

The sun strikes the amber of her dreaming eyes

where I am trapped like a prehistoric fly.

She smiles.

I must get to know her.

She is my wife.

East London as Kops knew it no longer exists. The dockside Jewish communities once sheltering there from the Holocaust have moved on to the prosperous North-West London suburbs of Golders Green and Hampstead. Their place has been taken by more recent immigrant communities from South Asia, introducing to it their very differently exuberant culture. But East London has not forgotten Kops.

The collection opens with the poem Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East paying homage to that institution, once known as the university of the poor, that the poet used to attend as an ill-clad, hungry child feasting on literature. Today, lines of that poem grace the walls of the library, which now serves a splendid modern museum.

On a recent visit to the museum for a performance of a Kops play — Whitechapel Dreams (2008), about an Asian teenager seeking refuge from her family at the library — I watched young girls and stern matrons gaze at Kops fondly when they thought he did not notice. A bartender brought me free drinks when he become aware that I was in the poet’s company.

Kops is a well known figure of the community. He stages plays there and holds poetry readings, lectures and theatrical workshops. The local press reports on his views and activities. Many residents warmly recognize him on streets and in restaurants.

Kops left school at 13 during the Blitz. He tried acting and the second-hand book trade, drifted through the bohemian world of Soho and won sudden, unexpected fame with his East End play The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1957).

That was drama steeped in the Yiddish theatrical tradition. It pioneered Britain’s “New Wave” of “kitchen-sink” drama that was to sweep away a lot of entrenched theatrical conventions. He was hailed for it by the critics of the day as a significant trendsetter. But several of his subsequent plays were slaughtered by the press. A theatre performing his play Ezra (1981) about the anti-Semite American poet Ezra Pound was firebombed. Most of his life, Kops was dogged financial worries.

This Room in the Sunlight — the final poem in the collection — sings the joy of the simple, greatest pleasures of love, creativity and sharing. Kops’ ability to issue such a book after the bleak decades of drug-induced breakdowns praises the steadfast, unflinching support of a strong and devoted wife.

THOMAS ORSZÁG-LAND is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent. His last major work was Christmas in Auschwitz: Holocaust Poetry Translated from the Hungarian of András Mezei (Smokestcack, England, 2010).

This is a first poetry collection by Native-American poet M.L. Smoker. ‘Hanging Loose,” the long-time publisher of the acclaimed Native-American writer Sherman Alexie, has a reputation of publishing an eclectic group of up and coming poets. In “Another Attempt At Rescue,” Smoker deals with one of the great themes of American literature. The assimilation into the mainstram society, and the pulls of the Old World. In this case M.L. Smoker feels the constant pull of the tribe,, the reservation; even when she is far from home. This is a struggle many an immigrant had to face. The same is true of native-Americans, whose land was taken for the price of cheap costume jewelry, or a treaty written in very small print. They found themselves foreigners in their own land. In her poem “Letter to Richard Hugo,” Smoker addresses the late poet with a love letter to her native land after a foray in the larger world: “ Dick: The resevoir on my end of the state is great for fishing. Some of the banks are tall and jagged, others are more patient,/ taking their time as they slope into rocky beaches/… I almost/ thought of not returning to finish the writing program/ you began with your own severe desire for language, But I/ did. And know I am at the end. Already though, I’ll admit/ to you, I’m thinking of home. I have been this whole/time.” (13).

In “Untitled,” I am reminded of Henry Roth’s character in “call It Sleep,” a small Jewish boy, and son of immigrants, who traverses the world of lyrical Yiddish to guttural English. Here Smoker seeks to reconcile her conflicted tongues to no avail: “ I witnessed a Grizzly bear tear into a fallen tree trunk/ with muscle, claw and all the force/ of her own body… I find that certain words arrive first:/ in the woods heavy with near darkness/ she could only be known by one name– wakan sija/ as in instinct: “the bad holy thing.”/ In this pasage that exists between word / and thought/ I have been forced/ to learn a great deal of the collapse/ of one language upon another./ I offer up many explanations for this/ too-often conflicted tongue, never/arriving at any shape of reconciliation.” (36).

What I like most about this collection is that Smoker makes the reader understand what she misses with vivid images, rich language, and real longing.

Book Review:

Breakfast at Kilumney by Maureen Weldon.

Poetry Monthly Press, 39 Cavendish Road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY, England (poetrymonthly@btinternet.com) ISBN 978-1-906357-31-3, Paperback, 47pp., 5 pounds.

Just occasionally, the Small Press turns up a gem, a gift to us all. Martin Holroyd’s Poetry Monthly Press has now done that.

“Because Time is Such a Short Wink”, the last piece in Maureen Weldon’s new collection, is about as close to perfection as an early version of a poem is likely to get. This is no exaggeration.

Every image in the poem is original and powerful. Every word sits where it must, as though it had been invented to grace this very poem.

I have watched Weldon’s progression from an exuberant, gifted novice to a disciplined writer at times quite ruthless in trimming lines down to the essential. But she is still, although very rarely, tripped up by the odd cliché, like “she is a delight”. But even then she closes the weakened poem with “to pass the day into stars”, that soars.

(A cliché is an attractive expression so worn by over-use that it loses its meaning. It is useful because it identifies hidden meaning lurking beyond the words, waiting to be expressed in a new way. When I spot a cliché in my own copy — we all do — I ask myself to say the same in different words. This can be difficult. In my experience, it is always rewarding.)

Weldon — child Maureen, life-loving Maureen, powerful Maureen — shines through the text: “To be alive is sufficient”, “I want to juggle the stars”, “The root is very strong” and “Hope:/like a new moon, or a new lover’s kiss”.

Over the years, Weldon has been introducing something new to European literature: publicly expressed approval of the joyful freedom of old women and old people to seek fulfilment within themselves and each other.

“Stars are the footlights”, observes a retired ballerina in the new collection as she sits in shawls and buttoned-up boots, and “sun floods my stage”.

And, in a poem about the always untimely decay of human beauty — hers, yours and mine — she resolves to light romantic candles, “One for him, one for me” and with “breasts high as Olympian peaks” and “Lips cunning like Aphrodite” to celebrate life until dawn.

May these lines take root in the culture.

Thomas Land

IBSN: 978-4303-1034-1

Review By: Charles P. Ries
Word Count: 270

In her third book of poetry, “Blood Soaked Dresses” Gloria Mindock raises horror to transcendent allegory. With language that has a lyrical soft quality to it, her new book of poetry becomes the perfect vehicle to express moments (sad, horrific, and glorious) that are set in El Salvador during its civil war from 1980 to 1992. When we see the massacre of innocents continuing in Kenya, Somalia, Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan – the list becomes painfully endless. Her book becomes a timeless poetic prayer for peace.

Her book of poetry is about the most painful of subjects. Through Mindock’s love of this culture, its people, words, and many flavors, she creates transcendent metaphor after transcendent metaphor. Here are a few cherry-picked from her poem, “Seeing Is Only a Flawed Secret”: “A long shadow filling my body”, “I have conversation with the abyss”; "My weary mind is just a symbol.” “The sky is gray today. / healing itself back to blue.” Jesus, rearrange your schedule. / Go, show me your lips. Make your kiss / a compass so I know where to go.” “I look out the window and feel / like a fool. / Everyone carries on with no ears. / Such motionless supervision – a crime!” Amazing – and these lines and phrases are taken from just one of her 45 poems.

Mindock’s success with “Blood Soaked Dresses” is all the more remarkable given how very hard it is to write about horror. If a poet can enter into this world, speak to this blackness and create a wisp of hope, then the poet is by demonstration a great writer indeed.

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typewriter art
By: Mark Sonnenfeld
Marymark Press
45-08 Old Millstone Drive
East Windsor, NJ 08520
Price: $4 / 16 Pages

ISBN: 978-0-9798819-9-2

Review By: Charles P. Ries
Word Count: 308

Mark Sonnenfeld is a unique creature in the small press. His world is one that lives at the intersection of poetry, word, and visual art. Many times his use of language has nothing to do with complete thought or meaning, but rather the splattering of words in a random cascade. We might call his work “experimental”, but for the fact that poetry, as one of writings shortest forms, lends itself to constant variation and experimentation. His new book, “typewriter art” is no different. Dedicated to small press pioneer and all around good-guy Joseph Verrilli, he takes words, or rather the ink-on-paper-image of words, and collides them with a phrase. On page 8 we find word the word “Mark” in 68 point type face and below it the phrase, “Magazines from the stack”. On page 5 we find the phrase “I woke to head pressure” in 14 point type laid onto a page that has a series of letters extracted from words in 68 point bold black type face. His work is so conceptual that it is even hard to clearly describe – it must be both seen and read.

So what is one to make of this? Is it poetry or is it visual art? Certainly it is experimental, and in each art form there is a mad scientist who will push the medium’s relevance toward the absurd, toward meaninglessness, through the trap door of context, and perhaps, toward yet new meanings. Will this become the rage? Will thousands of writers try to do what Sonnenfeld has done? I doubt it, but the highest form of flattery isn’t always imitation, sometimes it is our acknowledgement to artists like Sonnenfield that we have experienced their creation and encourage their continued exploration. The great literary unknown will be a richer friendlier planet because we have pioneers like Sonnenfeld orbiting the “word”.

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THE WIND TWIRLS EVERYTHING
By: Francine Witte
Muscle Head Press Chapbooks
Boneworld Publishing
3700 County Road 24
Russell, New York 13684
Price: $5 / 40 Pages / 25 Stories

Review By: Charles P. Ries
Word Count: 366

Francine Witte’s book of flash fiction/prose poems gives us two wonderful things. The first is her nimble and effortless use of story, form, and technique. This collection of 25 short form vignettes shows us how quickly a skilled writer can create place, character, conflict, and move a story to a stratifying conclusion. Witte who is also a poet and a playwright applies these two forms into interesting, fast moving short stories. Her technique is effortless and invisible, but central to making these stories move forward.

The second gift of “The Wind Twirls Everything” is her reflection on love, clueless good hearted men, place, and family. The men who populate her stories “try” to do the right thing, they are not without heart and soul, but still they do manage to stumble. Into this mix are the women who love, long for, or try to stay away from them. This collision of interests and abilities gives the stories in this collection their strong core. She is quick and nimble as she riffs around a variety of topics: a chair, a love, a city, a time, a man, a woman.

There are many great stories in this collection: Jake Is A Forgotten Place, Someone Keeps Calling, My Husband’s Mistress, Joe and Sue Get In The Car, to name a few. The open paragraph of her story, “The Romance Of Sadness” gives us a taste of how well and how quickly Witte invites us into her world, “One day, she fell in love with the sadness. Unlike the man who had given it to her, the sadness would stay with her long into the night and never leave. If the sadness did leave, there would more sadness. And that was good.” And again her opening paragraph of “Someone Keeps Calling”: “A faraway voice. Like a voice underwater. He says hello. Nothing more. He hangs up. Calls back. His breath is angry, inviting, sexual. He’s distant, but intimate. Saying nothing. Saying everything.”

What a treat to see Witte bob and weave structure, pacing, and story with such alacrity. How wonderful to read stories that run no more than 350 words in length contain so much heart, humor, yearning and meaning.

________________________________________________________

Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over two hundred print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory and five books of poetry — the most recent entitled, The Last Time which was released by The Moon Press & Publishing. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org). He is on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore (www.woodlandpattern.org) and a member of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. But most of all he is a founding member of the Lake Shore Surf Club, the oldest fresh water surfing club on the Great Lakes (http://www.visitsheboygan.com/dairyland/). You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literati.net/Ries/

A few months ago I asked Chris Harter, Editor/Publisher of Bathtub Gin who were some the pioneers in the independent small press movement. He said without a doubt one of them had to be the late d.a. levy of Cleveland, Ohio – this was the first time I had ever heard of d.a. levy.

Levy was 26 years old when he shot himself. Well regarded small press editor, Len Fulton says that the mimeo graph revolution “is almost overwhelming in its reach and passion for its subject. It is sobering to think that one young person could accomplish so much in so short a time, while confronting torment from within – and genuine torments from without.” While I enjoyed reading levy’s poetry and seeing his visual art, what I found most compelling were the numerous interviews with him from this time period. They reminded me how ground breaking the free speech movement of the 1960’s was, and what a wonderful, diverse and passionate group of poets were at the forefront of this effort.

In Karl Young’s essay on levy he says, “levy invented more literary forms then any other young poet working in the U.S. in the 1960’s.” Levy who only graduated from high school devoured books and build an international network of writing friends. He was consumed by language and words. When he was arrested on obscenity charges in 1967 Allen Ginsberg and the infamous Fugs (Ed Sanders rock group) came to Cleveland for benefit concert. He never left Cleveland or, rather never gave up on Cleveland. As Ed Sanders says, “Cleveland was levy’s decision. I think it was an act of Cleveland patriotism. ….he wasn’t going to let anyone drive him out.”

Contributors to this book include: Ed Sanders, T.L. Kryss, Karl Young, Allen Frost, Larry Smith, Russell Salamon, John Jacob, Doug Manson, and Michael Basinski. The book includes a 2006 DVD of Kon Petrochuk’s film documentary titled, if i scratch, if i write. It also includes a chronology of his life and work, biographical essays, photographs, interviews, profiles, statements, letters, art work, collage, poems, critical appreciations of his writing and art, “Cleveland Prints” in full color. This is as comprehensive and riveting a book about an artist, passion, and persecution as I have ever read. It’s all meat, no bullshit. I found it confounding and amazing that such a young, untrained writer could grow himself in to such a remarkable talent in so short a time.

I asked Larry Smith of Bottom Dog Press why he published this book and he told me, “I know that I and Ingrid Swanberg, as co-editors, have long had a sympathy for the outrider or outsider artist and writers. My books on rebel-poet Kenneth Patchen and later Lawrence Ferlinghetti were my launching place into the world of publishing on alternative writing. Ingrid’s big dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison links levy with world writers of vision and rebellion. We both carried a deep appreciation for d.a.levy as a person of small means who created a great deal of good through his devotion and hard work. That he was persecuted by the forces that be (were and are) in Cleveland is clearly documented in our book. But we wanted to go beyond making levy a martyr hero, and show the range of his vision and the achievement of his work. He is acclaimed internationally today as a visual artist, concrete poet, and main force of the 1960′s underground movement. To bring it home, his poems about his native place and times are just remarkable works deserving of our deepest attention because the repressive forces he confronted are still with us. Long live levy.”

The conclusion of Ed Sanders interview is beautiful tribute to this young genius, “On November 24, 1968, he shot himself in the forehead with his childhood .22 rifle sitting lotus. And once again pled nolo contendere. It’s always difficult to make sense of a poet’s brief florescence, Hart Crane…d.a. levy…the chaff of genius, blown up above harsh Cleveland. It may take centuries to sort him out. It often does with poets. The issues of economic justice and personal freedom which wore out the good bard levy have not yet been addressed in America. And we need a way that a shyer and yes even more timorous genius can flourish their proper span. And Darryl Allen Levy live not his span, but his poems….”The Bells of the Cherokee Ponies,” “Kibbutz in the Sky,” North American Book of the Dead, Cleveland undercovers, and a big series of concrete books that find their measure. [Raises fist in solidarity] Shine on, oh d.a. levy, rinsed in the American dream…”

If you love the independent small press, poetry, and the freedom of expression we all hold so dear, you must read this book.

____________________________________________

Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over one hundred and seventy print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory and five books of poetry — the most recent entitled, The Last Time which was released by The Moon Press in Tucson, Arizona. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org), Pass Port Journal (www.passportjournal.org) and ESC! (www.escmagazine.com). He is on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore (www.woodlandpattern.org). He is a member of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission and a founding member of the Lake Shore Surf Club, the oldest fresh water surfing club on the Great Lakes. You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literati.net/Ries/

http://www.centennialpress.com/

Review By: Charles P. Ries

I had finished my reading at Milwaukee’s venerated Woodland Pattern Book Center’s Poetry Marathon, when a twenty-something guy carrying a camcorder and tape deck says to me, “I’d love to use some of your stuff in my Anthills. How about it?” That was my first meeting with small press publisher, Charles Nevsimal. He started fast, and he hasn’t slowed down.

Centennial Press’s inaugural issue of Anthills came out in 2000. Anthills 2 soon followed, and by the time Issues 3 & 4 came along, the zine had already featured an impressive roster of small press heavy weights and new voices including: Antler, Matt Cook, A.D. Winans, Susan Firer, Gunther C. Fogle, William Taylor Jr., John Sweet, justin.barrett, Nathan Graziano, Karl Koweski, Glen W. Cooper, Lynne Savitt, Todd Moore, Bradley Mason Hamlin, Lyn Lifshin, Alex Carlson, and John Tuschen (plus a host of others). Deborah Bingen joined the team in 2002 as artist and designer (and later went on to marry the Editor). Her contribution was immediate with the release of two successive chapbooks: The System by A.D. Winans, and Exclamation Points: Ad Infinitum! by Antler, both praised for their content as well as design. Centennial Press filled the time between chapbooks with a string of broadsides for poets Gunther C. Fogle and Jeff Poniewaz. Most recently, Centennial Press has released chapbooks for B.J. Best (a pocket-sized book called Crap) and Alex Carlson (Whispering Winds: the Record Player Reads.) Both have sold extremely well.

Q: Chuck, Tell me how you ended up a small press publisher? When did you start?

A: I went to a small Lutheran University school here in southeastern Wisconsin. Early Freshman year, my Intro to Writing professor, Jean Timpel invited me to a Tuesday night writer’s group meeting on campus. It wasn’t long before I volunteered to spearhead the design and publication of the school’s modest literary journal, which, prior to my involvement, was nothing more than 8-1/2” by 11” sheets of white typing paper bound by a shoddy plastic spiral coil. I saw the potential for something far greater than what was being realized, and saw to it that the journal evolved into something more deserving. The first thing I did was trimmed the size down to that of an actual book. By the time my Junior year rolled around, I was one of two people selecting content for publication, something I did in addition to the proofing, editing, designing, and printing of the book.

I was lucky to have been there (Concordia) at the same time as several other talented writers. Together, we formed The Foundry, a semi-elitist-but-altogether-inspiring campus writer’s group. Even in the early days with The Foundry, I always pictured myself putting something similar together once I graduated. Something I controlled completely. So after the shock of being a college graduate wore off, I sat down with my buddy, Josh Peterson, and together we gave birth to Centennial Press (named after the bar we frequented in our undergrad years). Anthills became the name of our publication. The ball was rolling. But soon, Josh moved away and I was left with sole patronage of Centennial Press. I’d already gathered poems from friends and ex-Foundry members, but I wanted Anthills to be more than just a bunch of material from people I knew well. Then, lightning struck. I “discovered” the poetry of A.D. Winans. I was surfing the Internet and reading everything of his I could find. So I sent him an e-mail requesting poetry for publication and he responded in kind the very next day with three poems that completely blew my mind.

With restored verve, I sought out Milwaukee poet, Antler. The people at Woodland Pattern bookstore were kind enough to pass a letter on to him. About a week after I dropped off the letter, he called me on the telephone to tell me how excited he was that a new poetry zine was being birthed in Milwaukee. He also told me to watch my P.O. box for a submission. Wouldn’t you know it; the man sent me 15 poems not one week later. In addition to that, he urged his friend, Jeff Poniewaz, to submit, which he also did. And the rest, as they say, is history …

Q: Why do you do it?

A: I publish because it is my way of putting something beautiful into the world … something worthwhile. It’s a labor of love in many ways, I suppose. I hardly make a dime off anything I publish – hell, most times I end up well in the red. But there’s something about giving people a book or a sheet of paper with words on it knowing it might in one way or another lend to the shaping of their world. Publishing these books is to me every bit as fulfilling as writing a good poem. You’re seeing your vision through to the end. And you walk into a bookstore and the book you made, you created, you birthed into the world is resting on the shelves among all the giants … Neruda, Cummings, Whitman, Bukowski … that gives me chills every time. But that’s just my self-centric reason for doing this. I do it also, of course, because I believe strongly in the poetry I put out there. I do it because I want to give these poems a home. The home I give them is Anthills.

Q: Are you more of a publisher, or more of a writer?

A: I would say there’s a stronger urge in me to sit down at my typewriter and rap out a poem or two … or eight. But I’m delighted as hell I don’t have to choose either/or in real life, because my desire to put out Anthills – or a chapbook or broadside for that matter – is so strong, there’s not a time, really, I’m not thinking about my next project. And in many ways, I suppose, the two “vocations,” I’ll call them, are not all too dissimilar. As editor/publisher, I’m deeply involved in each project … and by the time the issue (or chap/broadside) is published, it magically contains so much of me, it’s almost as if it came from the same place my poems come from. Not only that, but every poem I publish through Centennial Press is one I wish I’d written. So, even when the writer in me is taking a backseat to the publisher, he’s busily taking notes on how to better himself. Oddly, though, I feel no great need to see my own poems in print. I did at first, because I suppose I needed a validation of some sort. But I haven’t sent anything out for several months. I probably wrote near 400 poems last year alone, and only three to four people have ever seen them.

Q: Your Anthills series is as much graphic art as it is a premier collection of writers and their work – what are you trying to accomplish with Anthills?

A: Thank you so much. I’m very actively and creatively involved in the pieces I publish. There’s much to be said about magazines like Free Verse (which is utterly fabulous, by the way) or Fuck! (which has its own charm) that simply put poetry down on a page and disseminate it. But that’s not for me. I am incessantly seeking a new format or an inventive way of putting poetry into the world because I’m interested in creating “books as art,” items that can be cherished as much for what they are as for what they say. Then there are the poems themselves, and the selection thereof. The way they all fit together in my mind … they tell a story. There is always a reason for the order in which I arrange the poems, even if it’s not at first glance evident to the reader. But to put it simply, Charles, I want to create something people will love and hold on to for a long time to come.

Q: Who designs your books?

A: My wife, Deborah, designs all the books and broadsides for Centennial Press. She’s brilliant, and I’m damn lucky to have her, both as my small press partner and my wife. I love the interest she puts into each piece, reading it before figuring out how to interpret it visually. Sometimes she’ll draw inspiration directly from the poems we’re publishing. Other times, she’ll have a certain vision that she’ll want to carry through independent of the poem or poems. But the work she does always floors me. Without her, there could be no Centennial Press. Period. So yeah, maybe I’m the one everybody knows because I’m the one in contact with the poets we publish, I’m the one being interviewed (the one with the loud mouth). But she’s the reason our books are so wonderful. She’s the wizard behind the curtain.

Q: You seem to have connected with many of the major poets in the small press, how did you manage to do that over such a short period of time?

A: It was rather easy actually. I simply became a fan of their work. Antler, Bill Taylor, A.D. Winans, justin.barrett, Glenn Cooper, Nathan Graziano, the list goes on … even publishers like Brian Morrissey and Bill Roberts. I became a fan of their work and that’s how I approached them as a publisher. What poet isn’t flattered when a publisher seeks him out because he’s just gotta publish one of his poems? Over time, I became quite close to a lot of those guys. I feel bad though because recently, I’ve kind of fallen off the map a little. I got married in 2004, and while it might sound cliché, I’ve sort of been adapting to (and fully embracing) my home life. Time goes by now without my even noticing because I’m doing this or that, and next thing you know, my friend A.D. turns 70 and I didn’t even wish him a happy birthday. I regret that. Also, I’ve taken on another job which has kept me pretty busy … I’m the editor of Milwaukee’s INFO* magazine. If it’s not one thing, it’s always something else.

Q: How does Milwaukee, Wisconsin work as a center for your publishing efforts? Do you ever wish you could be in New York or San Francisco?

A: There’s something romantic about being a publisher of poetry in this blue-collar Midwestern town. I feel at home here. And there’s a strong scene here as well, writers like Antler, Susan Firer, yourself, Catfish McDaris, Matt Cook, (the list goes on and on) – Alex Carlson, B.J. Best (whose book Crap I nominated for the Pushcart Prize), Brandon Lewis – calling Milwaukee their home, it’s a very exciting place to coexist as poet and publisher. I feel it almost an intrinsic duty of mine to put Milwaukee on the map – or at least, help keep it there. That’s why you’ll see many local poets in Anthills mingling with other small press big (and little) fish from across the U.S. and the globe.

Q: You know a ton of writers, now you have to pick your top two living poets and tell me who they are and why they top your list.

A: Only two? Jeeze. I’ll say, without a doubt, three of the best voices in the vast world of small press poetry are William Taylor Jr., justin.barrett, and John Sweet. Their work continually floors me and I will read their words until the day I die. Nathan Graziano is another who’s really come into his own. His book, Honey, I’m Home, is one of the best chapbooks I’ve ever read.

That said, however, my two favorite living poets are potentially the best-known small press poet actively working, and the least known: Antler and Gunther C. Fogle, respectively. Antler is perhaps the most wonderful human being I have ever had the privilege of getting to know. His poetry transcends every notion of beauty … he shows me things, allows me to see the world so clearly in ways I never thought imaginable. He is the closest thing the world has to Walt Whitman and his books should line the walls of your heart. They certainly do mine. I never go anywhere without my copy of his
Selected Poems, and I make a point to read from it aloud whenever my travels take me someplace new. Antler is a blessing and I cherish him the way I cherish his poems.

As for GC Fogle, he’s a different breed entirely. The thing about Fogle’s work is that it always makes me want to write. There’s some sort of kinetic energy existing in his poems that drives me into action. His bravado is uncanny, but that’s something I dig about him. His poems are bigger than he is. They’re beautiful, they’re tragic, they’re hilarious … and most of them exist only in the envelopes he sent me from his flat in Colorado. Original
copies he writes (on a manual typewriter, of course) and sends off to me without editing, without revision, without worrying about making copies first or sending them out to mags for publication. How romantic is that?! There are some truly brilliant poems lying on my desk at home, poems only my eyes have ever seen. But don’t you worry … I’m going to make sure one day the world too has its chance to read the words of Gunther C. Fogle. He’s one of the reasons I’m a publisher.

Q: What projects are you working on?

A: Currently, I’m working on my most ambitious project to date, a book of New & Selected poems by William Taylor Jr. called, Words For Songs Never Written. It’s a project I’ve had on the backburner for a long while now because I’ve always lacked the money needed to do it justice – and this is one of those books that NEEDS to be done right. But I’m happy to report it’s finally in full swing. The poems have been chosen and Deb is working on design ideas as we speak. Bill is one hell of a poet, and this book of his deserves to be on the shelf of every self-respecting admirer of poetry out there. I’m honored to be the one to publish it for him.

I’ve just released a chapbook for the mega-superior cool Milwaukee poet-from-another-century-altogether, Alex Carlson. Al’s book is filled with some of the most life-affecting words you’ll ever read, small press or not. The man’s writing is breathtakingly good. He’s the real deal.

I’m also still piecing together poems for a collection I’ve dubbed Poems As Pickup Lines, which features 10-12 fun, short, “pickup” poems by poets like Bill Taylor and justin.barrett. They’re each printed on small, business card-sized paper, packaged together in a unique way for maximal portability. It’ll be a fun little collection. Then, of course, I’m always working on Anthills, and I’ve got books by John Sweet and Gunther C. Fogle forthcoming as well. One thing’s for sure, I’m always busy … and I’m always broke. But it’s always worth it.

Q: Are you open to submissions? How should writers get their work to you? What are you looking for?

A: I accept submissions for Anthills year-round (I don’t believe in cutoff dates) and they can be sent to me via e-mail or snail mail. But I’m utterly awful at responding … I’m trying to turn over a new leaf (I’ve never liked that cliché). I’m looking for poetry that kicks my ass and makes me cry. Poetry that sets fire to the world. Short, long, free verse, haiku, whatever. My only requisite is that it makes me feel. If it does that, it’ll find its way into print one way or another.

Q: What’s you biggest beef with the small press? And tell the truth …egos, nepotism, small minds, high walls?

A: All of the above. In my opinion, there are too many poets out there looking for favors … “You publish me and I’ll publish you.” Poets are very cheap. They want you to buy their books but won’t shell out $4 for one of yours. In general, they’re too full of themselves. There are too many poets out there emulating Bukowski, as if he was some sort of small press martyr. They want to be Bukowski, they want to write Bukowski, they want to make it big like Bukowski. And they’re too caught up in this bullshit of a
fantasy to realize they’re scamming themselves. If they truly want to be like Bukowski, they should stop trying to be like him and start acting who they really are. I’ve read enough poems about puking, fucking, boozing, gambling, whoring … I’m through with all that. Those poets should take a look at what they’re putting into the world and ask themselves, “Is it really worth it?” You want to know what I love about the small press. That you can have a guy like Nathan Graziano with balls enough to put together a
chapbook of poetry about how much he loves his wife, loves his little girl, questions himself as husband and father, and puts himself on the line like that … for everyone to see. That takes guts. Enough Bukowski already. Give me Nathan Graziano!

Q: What is your favorite small press publication – why?

A: That’s easy: Johnny Brewton’s X-Ray. Johnny Brewton does more with X-Ray than I could ever aspire to do with Centennial Press … though I certainly do aspire to play at his level. He’s one of my strongest inspirations when it comes to conjuring up innovative ways of packaging a poem. His publications are worth every penny you’ll dish out for them (and believe me, you can drop a pretty penny on his publications). But like I said, they’re always worth it. For Johnny, there are no boundaries, and I admire that about him.

A more affordable alternative would be Brian Morrissey’s Poesy and Linda Aschenbrenner’s Free Verse. Both are very fine zines whose editors are honest and have a great taste in poetry. Their format is simple but the work that finds its way into each is incredible. It’s a shame so many publications have come and gone in the short while I’ve been on the scene. It’s nice to know these two have achieved a certain staying power.

Lastly, I cannot allow myself to answer this question without mentioning Bill Roberts’ Bottle of Smoke Press and justin.barrett’s Hemispherical Press. These guys don’t publish zines, but they put out chapbooks and broadsides that are consistently great. They are both at the top of the small press publishing game.

Q: I hear you just got married. Congrats! What’s married life doing to your writing?

A: Thank you. Many months have passed since you first asked this question, Charles, so the “just” is a little misleading. (Another fine example of how I let time slip away from me.) For the near year-and-a-half since we’ve been married, I’d say probably half the poems I write are about my wife, or married life, etc. It’s an endless source of material for me, and the best thing of all is the poetry I write about Deborah always seems
to lead me to a deeper truth about our spectacular relationship I hadn’t previously been aware existed. I don’t know how many people in this world would love reading about my wife, but I sure do love writing about her.

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Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short
stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over one hundred and
twenty print and electronic publications. He has received three Pushcart
Prize nominations for his writing and most recently read his poetry on
National Public Radio’s Theme and Variations, a program that is broadcast
over seventy NPR affiliates. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a
novel based on memory. Ries is also the author of five books of poetry — the
most recent entitled, The Last Time which was released by The Moon Press in
Tucson, Arizona. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org
<http://www.wordriot.org/> ) and on the board of the Woodland Pattern
Bookstore in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Most recently he has been appointed to
the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. You may find additional samples of
his work by going to: http://www.literarti.net/Ries/